


Steve & Bucky Get A Puppy

by gabrielsingskaraoke



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Domestic Avengers, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Puppies, adopting puppies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2017-03-06
Packaged: 2018-09-28 16:10:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10134641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gabrielsingskaraoke/pseuds/gabrielsingskaraoke
Summary: Prompt #1: Steve gets a dog from SHIELD. Bucky stumbles across a mutt in an alley.A story filled with fluff, conspiring Agents, and a family growing with fur-babies.





	

**Author's Note:**

> My lovely girlfriend is giving me a prompt a day, and there was no better place to start than with Stucky and puppies. <3

Steve had to put up with a lot of “gifts” from SHIELD. They never turned out to be gifts that he thought he would want, but they often became things that he considered good. They’d gifted him with his superhero status, his armor and most of his friendships. They’d gifted him with a second chance at life after too long spent frozen in place. 

They were now, apparently, gifting him with a dog. 

Agent Koenig had said it would help his image. Which was unsettling, as Steve hadn’t thought his image needed help. He never expected to find himself in an official government meeting – PowerPoint included – trying to convince him to bring home a golden retriever.

He remembered wanting a dog growing up. Bucky had tried bringing a mutt by the house when they were kids. He’d already named it something absurd like Steve Jr before they realized the fur would trigger an asthma attack. Steve didn’t remember what had happened very well. One moment he had been laughing over Bucky’s argument for keeping the dog’s name and getting licks all over his face – the next he was waking up in a hospital and they never saw Steve Jr again. 

“What’s his name?” 

Agent Koenig smirked, “Well, Sir. If you allow me to flip to the next slide, we’ve compiled a list of -”

Steve stood up and slid his chair in. He tapped the retriever on it’s head and it stood up to follow him out of the room. 

“Uh, Sir, Captain?” Agent Koenig fumbled with his PowerPoint remote. “We aren’t actually done with the meeting, Captain. We still need to discuss the -”

“We’re done, Agent. Hamilton and I will be in the training room. It won’t be good for anyone’s image if I can’t bond with him.” Steve rested his hand on the top of Hamilton’s head, keeping him calm and close. “We can finish the meetings tomorrow, if you still find them necessary. Goodnight Agent.”

-

Bucky had found it in the alley. He was supposed to be in a meeting with the strange, too friendly Agent and Steve. Something about fixing their image. 

He knew what they were saying. He knew why they were saying it without saying. It wasn’t every day that Captain America moved in with his brainwashed childhood best friend. It wasn’t every day that pictures of them being too close were printed by paparazzi that had found a camera sharp enough to peek inside their windows. 

Steve kept pretending that he didn’t know why, but Bucky knew better. This was just another way that Bucky was making everything harder for him. Messing things up, and holding America’s favorite Captain from being the untarnished Superhero the world needed.

Bucky had been pacing around the neighborhood, trying to work up the courage to go to the meeting. They couldn’t force them apart. Steve wouldn’t let them. But that didn’t mean they were wrong.   
He’d only been pulled out of his thoughts when he heard the whining coming from the alley three streets down from their house – the opposite direction of the meeting. The whine was coming from a small and hungry looking mutt. It was chewing what looked like an old banana peel, nursing a hind leg that looked too red and sore to be healthy. 

Bucky remembered something about dogs. He knew there was a reason they shouldn’t come home. It had something to do with Steve. Little Steve. 

He tried to remember more, but sometimes the fuzziness in his brain wouldn’t cooperate with the reality in front of him. He had already picked up the mutt and carried him back home before he could over think it. Bucky was still trying to remember when he was sitting on the floor of the kitchen, sharing a bowl of cheerios with the mutt, when there was a bark from the hallway.

-  
Steve had been sitting on the floor of the training room petting the dog for too long. It was hours before he dragged himself out of the SHIELD center and back home. He’d named the retriever by then, fearing for another repeat of Steve Jr.

Hamilton had been on the PowerPoint list – SHIELD had probably run some kind of covert media screening to discover the most popular names of the moment. Steve knew he had to choose a name from the list, especially after realizing how rudely he’d left Agent Koenig’s presentation. The Agent tried hard – sometimes too hard – and Steve was too nervous about Bucky’s failure to show to sit for a moment longer in a meeting. 

He had also found himself too nervous to make his way back home. 

“He’ll love you, Hamilton.” Steve was brushing the dog’s head as he walked the hallway to their apartment. “He wouldn’t be able to say no to your face. Who could say no to a good boy like you?”

Hamilton barked, wagging his tail and dancing around Steve’s feet. For a moment, it brought a much needed smile to Steve’s face. 

The moment before a responding bark came from inside Steve’s apartment. Without thinking, Steve flew to the apartment door, and burst through it. It would be the third time in the month that SHIELD would be footing the bill for a new door, but Steve panicked whenever Bucky was involved. 

Hamilton flew between his legs, thinking he was running into a game - or a mission, Steve wasn’t sure where or how SHIELD had trained his new companion. He watched the scene in his small apartment play out in slow motion. 

Bucky was pinned onto the floor of their kitchen, with smears of mud running across his metal arm, and face. There was a bowl of cheerios turned over near his head, and a mud streaked mutt rolling around with Hamilton in the scattered cereal. Both dogs were taking turns licking Bucky’s face and cleaning the cheerios off the floor like snuffling vacuums. 

Steve laughed as Bucky struggling to pull himself away from the dogs, who were too interested in food and each other to keep fighting for his affection. He pointed at the mutt, and turned his best impression of puppy dog eyes on Steve. “That’s Brooklyn.”  
Steve smiled, pointing towards the golden retriever, “Hamilton.” 

Steve thought they would have to talk about it more. He’d worked through a variety of arguments on the way home. He hadn’t pictured himself fighting with two full grown dogs in a bathtub while Bucky used a Q-tip to dig mud out of his arm, while arguing with Clint about dog food substitutes on speaker phone.

Steve didn’t think he would find himself running through the house after dripping wet dogs or begging Nat to bring them her hair dryer. There was a lot in his life that was unexpected - the way that Bucky kissed him grabbing the front of his wet shirt, Hamilton’s fear of hair dryers and Brooklyn’s love of being combed. He didn’t expect something meant to save his image to bring so much more into his new life.

-

Agent Koenig had reported back to Director Coulson after Steve had left the training room. 

Agent May had called him shortly after, refusing to return home until she had washed the mud out of her leather jacket. 

“I don’t see why you were so set on them getting these dogs. It’s none of our business, Coulson.”

“They needed a home.” Coulson smiled into the phone, pulling up a secure feed of Captain’s hallway just in time to see Agent Clint Barton struggling with a bag of dog food and Agent Natasha Romanov giving a thumbs up to the hidden camera. “And a home needed them.”


End file.
